On being left-wing but European (and so "white"): A scandalous declaration

Perhaps the left wing is based on universality (Jewish, Christian, modern republican, whatever) and the right on a particularity that must refuse universality, perhaps on the grounds of threat and the need to survive or the will to prosper without these things being threatened by those who would do so.

If so, that could supply a sufficient reason to be right-wing and not liberal on certain issues. Suppose that a man or woman who is black treats me in a manner that can only be called hateful, because they hate me, and they say it is because (they imagine that) I am their oppressor. Suppose also that I have done this person no wrong; the only wrong is what they associate me with.

Then I would be forced by circumstances to do something they would think is hatred or even an attempt at 'supremacy' on my part. I would be forced to defend my life, property, or ability to live peacefully. I would be forced to try to enforce a separation.

I think this is plausible, and I do not think it is wrong, though it may be unfortunate, and might seem contrary to the most noble and happy liberal values. So.

My culture is European. I don't apologize for this, and will not. I can be curious, sometimes, about other parts of the world and people from it. But if you tell me that the European people are oppressors, automatically, certainly, irrevocably, and little else, I will want to show you you are wrong, or cancel my watching of your channel.

In fact, I am on the left-wing, probably more than you are, though it is certainly a European left. It is a European intellectual left-wing.

We seem to be the people liberals most hate, apart from Jews, who are now hated mainly by the liberal-left for being European and part of capitalism. I am critical of capitalism, but it seems that is a detail.

Most racism in America today is not white but black. I know it sounds scandalous to say this, but consider: If you stand in a public square in America today and say "I hate white people; they are the oppressors," you will suffer no harm, you won't even be fired from your job. You could be head of a popular religious sect and say this, and the liberal-left will not criticize you because they want your support and that of your followers, and they know you are solicitous towards other blacks. White racism is not tolerated, and anything that American liberals, with their hair trigger for prejudice, can imaginatively construct as white racism or "suprematism" (which does exist, and it's ugly and stupid, but there are actually very few people like this, and certainly most people who will be tarred with this brush, unlike some of Trump's supporters, are nothing of the kind), is considered totally grounds for exclusion of the person saying whatever they have been interdicted for saying, perhaps identified as a "micro-aggression" but left-liberals who exercise the hermeneutical creativity they learned in college, which enables them to impute beyond normal credibility to people they don't like, whatever they want to accuse them of. Black racism is normally tolerated, and it is even commonly said that reverse racism does not exist. Which is a way of saying that it is allowed to exist without being criticized, since it is not acknowledged for what it is.

That's the reality. It's ugly. I have long seen the world through the eyes of rather left-wing thinking, but I have to be torn when American left-liberals try to say that everything is race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and then that they are against the Europeans. So should I not complain if I am the victim of a left-liberal racial pogrom? I will complain.

Something is rotten in the state of the US, and why should it be so surprising that the right that we on the left oppose winds up marrying the liberalism that hypocritical talks only about official identities? Then they, who claim to be not just on the left but all of it, though they are really just militantly angered and intolerant corporate center-right liberals, they say that people like me are on the right. Sometimes I almost want to say, and what if we were?

I am European and Jewish, and I am German, French, English, and Irish, and I don't have a problem with being "white," though the notion of an identity that is a color is nonsense to me. I am culturally European and have European values, even more than American ones.

And see, I live here, too. And people like me are not the devil. We are not the devil you were looking for. You liberals and left-liberals who are really not what you seem to be. I am on a left that you don't recognize, but that's because you are liberals, corporate liberals, merely, and you wouldn't know.

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In Raoul Peck’s recent film on American black writer James Baldwin, “I am not your negro,” Baldwin is quoted saying that white people hate black people out or terror, and black people hate white people out of rage. This is true, though provocatively Baldwin does not say in the film that either side is justified or unjust in this. Think about it. Black people find that much of their life in America is oppressive. They are not the only ones to experience this, but they experience in a way that does seem to put them against the rest of us, or those of us who are “white,” or who are white because we think we are, as Ti-nehisi Coates put it (in the same book, he claims that black people really “are” their color, but whites merely have it a mask; how he justifies this claim epistemically is something of a puzzle). So, finding that you are often oppressed, and thus, frustrated in the ways that being oppressed involves, you hate, those who can be blamed, and indeed perhaps should be, because they, you think, are responsible for it. Suppose they are. So then you have got a legitimated antipathy, indeed a hate. Now what about the other side? In fact, and Baldwin is admitting this, most white racism is fear of black violent crime. They - we - do indeed fear that a people who are characteristically or often enraged at us because they know, believe, or assume that we do or want to oppress them somehow, we fear that they will get revenge on us through violence. Since all of us are born into a society that has the social structures and antagonisms it has, you could be a white person and be relatively innocent of the great historical and social crimes that are imputed to you, by association. Then it might strike you as horribly bizarre and unjustified that poor and “oppressed” people are desirous of revenge against you. Of course, their defenders will say that. you doubtless acted scornfully to them, and that is part of the general oppression. Really? I find that many black Americans act with scorn and contempt, when they are in power enough in the situation or institution that they can, towards white people. Maybe they want us to know, with some contempt, that they are competing against us, consider us “privileged” (unfairly enjoying expectations of success we don’t deserve), and they want us to know that they are better than us, and the proof is, they will get the jobs and we won’t. Maybe. I have certainly seen this. Or they are angry at all the injustices they have experienced or that their ancestors have, and now it’s payback time. Whatever; I at least have seen plenty of this scorn and contempt, the quiet civilized form of hatred. And violence. I don’t like violent crime, and I don’t want to be the object of it; do you? I bet you don’t. Yes, I know that white fears of black crime are often exaggerated, but they are not invented. Not at all. Now, if the violent crime does exist and is a problem, and if oppression is also a problem, and it is said to be a reason, I ask, what kind of insane liberal politics is it that says, but you must not talk about that, because then you are a racist? I know what kind of politics this is: It is American two-party politics. The liberal Democrats want people to think that black crime is not a real problem, but only a response to racial oppression. This is proven every time a white person is caught up fearing black violent crime. And the Republican Party is also based on a lie: that white fears of black violent crime are nothing more than a response to it. Never mind who is oppressed and how. Of course, both sides are right, and both are wrong. And by framing the problems in this way, they won’t get solved, but the two parties together can reap the results of not addressing them. These are the stakes.

But now, which is worse, oppression, or crime? Can this question even be answered? How would it be answered, without relativizing one problem (or one side of the problem) in terms of the other, in a way that keeps it an unsolved problem?

What if they went together, and we had a regime that hated oppression and hated crime? It would perhaps only seem oppressive to those who find themselves under its boot. Well, the two do together, and in this way: A liberal government and liberal government functionaries will treat oppressing someone else or being racist as a crime, and this criminalization will be the response to racism that pursues it as a crime, along with every other. This would work well with a certain authoritarianism. And you can find that on the left.

Indeed, black Americans are often very authoritarian, a fact that has been recognized. They are much more so, even in America, then their white counterparts. (That is partly because of differential privilege, but it cannot be said to be only that.) There are undoubtedly several reasons for this, which include; (a) evangelical Protestantism, as the religious tradition of most black Americans, which is very authoritarian (and the other main tradition, the Black Muslims of the Nation of Islam, which is a racist hate group that promotes hatred and violence against white people and Jews, is hardly less so), (b) the single-mother family, which often produces very angry mothers, in part because they are overworked and have extremely stressful lives; (c) military experience, which many blacks (and hispanics) in America have, because the military now is mercenary, hiring soldiers with promises of funding for college and a chance to get into a professional life, or at least a study job, (d) many returned soldiers are security guards; (e) black leaders preach a gospel of anger against white people.

There are two ways of thinking about this: One can ask whether violent crime or oppression is worse. Both are exaggerated, in the sense that few people in America today live lives that can be said to consist mainly of being victims or either oppression or violence. And we could wonder what, beyond a certain ideological reflex, being “totally” oppressed could mean, outside slavery itself, or its contemporary avatar, imprisonment, where people are employed as slave labors, and the prisons are overwhelmingly black. The second way of thinking about these two problems would be to see them as linked. Neither justifies the other, though both seem to, because they are part of a single complex. But in that case, you couldn’t sensibly blame anyone.

But the dominant liberal approach to racism is of course to denounce it morally. We have a punitive, or carceral racism and a punitive and carceral anti-racism. We also have a system, capitalism, that is baed on or tolerates a great deal of oppression and crime, and has developed ways to criticize both of these things, through moralities and prosecutions and summary punishments of individuals — moralities instead of the truly political, which seeks to change whole societies and systems, not just target persons. The liberalism that does this so relentlessly is a true conservatism; it does not undermine the system but sustains it.